by Derek Neal

Waterloo Bridge: Effect of Sunlight in the Fog

The mornings have become dark. These weeks are always strange, the end of October, just before the clock falls back and the mornings brighten again. For now I get ready in a sort of hinterland; it’s not night, but it’s not day either. The sky is a sheet of gray. I back out of the driveway, turn onto the main road. In the fog, the streetlights appear as beacons. Their brightness shocks me, and I remember a Monet painting I saw once in New York, a scene not of waterlilies or his garden, but the sun as a bright orange disk in the London fog. The wall text mentioned how Monet thought London was beautiful because of the fog, not despite it. This morning, the fog acts as a filter, casting a dull grayness everywhere but allowing the greens and reds of the streetlights to pass through. The road is relatively empty, I slip through a yellow light, leave the other cars behind, and I’m out on the open road, cruising downhill as the lights glow ahead of me.

I love driving. I was looking through my fiction writing recently—not much, just a page or two here and there—and I was surprised to see that much of it has to do with driving, or, if not driving, with the movement of the human body through space and time at an accelerated rate (ice skating and biking also feature). We are not made to move at such speeds, and when we do, something happens to our consciousness. Life feels different. Not every time, of course, but sometimes, and when it does, writing from a fictional viewpoint rather than in the style of an article seems the only way to transfer that phenomenological experience to the page.

The first thing I ever wrote that was any good falls into this category. I was in university, in a class for writing tutors, and we were tasked with writing a personal essay. I didn’t know how to write a personal essay—I didn’t know how to write about something meaningful to me without it coming off as trite and clichéd to others—so instead I submitted a short passage about diving into a lake I’d spontaneously written one summer day. I knew it was good because I’d written it while *life felt different *and I’d somehow managed to capture that experience in language. The essay was chosen as an example for the class. Then we had to expand our pieces into a longer story, but I couldn’t do it. I tried to re-enter the headspace that I’d inhabited while writing about diving, swimming, and floating, but no matter how hard I tried, nothing clicked. I wrote something and my teacher told me that she couldn’t follow it—it didn’t make sense.

Ice Skating

Ice Skating at Princess Point, Hamilton, Ontario

The other day: I was driving to the grocery store and decided to turn off by the water and go out on the ice. Why this day and not the others? Why do days of nothing go by and then, one day, something happens? My skates were in the trunk; I carried them out, balanced on one foot while putting one skate on, then balanced on that skate while putting the other on. I hadn’t ice skated in some years, but the body never forgets. In the distance, against the backdrop of a setting sun, a group of boys were playing hockey. Other people were bumbling around, walking as much as skating. I pushed off and found that I didn’t move much. The ice was bumpy and patchy, in some parts it was slushy. I moved in stops and starts, unable to find a smooth stretch of ice to stretch my legs, then, finally, I hit one. I glid effortlessly across the surface, like a bird in flight.

Driving to the Cottage

Last year, I was driving to my family’s cottage. To get there, I take the 401 East to Kingston, then I turn north on Highway 10, and eventually I am on rural roads and finally an unpaved, rock road. The drive to the cottage is a winnowing, whereas the drive home, to the city, is a widening; I go from four lanes, to two lanes, to one lane, to a single lane for both directions, and vice versa. When I leave the highways and enter the one lane roads, I go from a flat runway to an undulating, serpentine track that weaves in and out of forests, ponds, and lakes. On the highway, I am one, isolated and separate from my surroundings. The road is oppressive, I bear down on it, trying to make good time, racing against the clock, but when I leave it, and the car starts riding the hills up and down, and I feel the centrifugal force as I take a turn around a bend and emerge, perhaps onto a view of the sun glittering off the surface of water, I feel not one, I become the road, the trees, the lake, just up until I have to slow down and turn onto the rock road, at which point I put down my window and drive slowly through the fields hearing the buzz of the insects and the crunch of the tires.

Canadian Tire / Driving to Toronto

I was writing in my journal the other day, just jotting down some thoughts, seeing what would happen, where my writing would lead, when I started to write about sitting on the curb in the parking lot of a Canadian Tire. I’d been there a few days before, had ridden my bike up a winding road, then along a stretch where cars whizzed by at 80 kilometers per hour, before arriving at the Canadian Tire, sweaty yet fulfilled by my physical exertion. I went in and bought a green Powerade, then a few other things I needed, put them in my backpack, and went outside to sit on the curb. The parking lot was sparsely populated—it was almost closing time—and the sun was going down in the distance. I don’t know what it was, maybe the time of day, or the fact that I’d just pushed my body close to its limit, giving me a sort of runner’s high, but the thought came to me as I sucked down the green Powerade: there’s beauty even here, even in the parking lot of a Canadian Tire, there’s beauty.

So I wrote this down in my journal—*there’s beauty even here, even in the parking lot of a Canadian Tire, there’s beauty—*and I thought about the way the sun sometimes shines off the roofs of cars on the highway; when I’m driving back from Toronto, there’s a point where you merge onto the 403 from the QEW, and for a moment, you’re at a higher elevation than the cars coming in the opposite direction, towards Toronto, and there’s hundreds of cars, maybe even thousands, all stretching into the distance on a five lane highway, and the sun reflects off their tops and it’s like a thousand flowers blooming. It’s like a thousand flowers blooming, I wrote in my journal, and I thought about the power of this image, of everything being the same, all together, a thousand cars on the 403, every second of every day, coming and going, and going and coming.

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Driving and Literature

One book that captures the sorts of experiences I’m interested in is Jon Fosse’s Septology, a novel (really seven short novellas) featuring more driving that any other I know. Here are a few examples, as narrated by Asle, the main character:

I’m driving out of Bjørgvin and I fall into the nice stupor you can get into while you’re driving…(16)

Asle refers often to the “stupor” induced by driving:

I’m tired after being out all day, after driving to Bjørgvin and back, and now I’m driving to Bjørgvin a second time today since I feel such uneasiness inside me that I just have to drive back again, I think and I drive and I fall into a kind of peaceful unthinking stupor and I see a few snowflakes land on the windshield and I drive father in along Sygnefjord and I see more and more snowflakes land on the windshield and I turn on the wipers and they make semicircles for me to see through, and it’s white around them from the snow… (101)

Another example where Asle feels as if he merges with the snowy surroundings:

I feel white and empty, and now I’ve driven all the way down along Sygnefjord and I’m about halfway from Dylgja to Instefjord, I think, and I’m driving slow and steady, I think and I look at the white road and I see Asle standing there on stage in the Youth Centre… (315)

A final example about the peaceful effects of driving:

There’s not much traffic, it’s been a while since I’ve seen another car, and I think that I like driving, it’s like it calms me down, like I fall into a kind of daze, sort of, like I’m collected and focused just on driving, nothing else…when I’m driving I just listen without listening to the same thing the whole time, and while I’m listening it’s like my whole life becomes calm and peaceful… (354-355)

As I’ve noted before, Septology is written as one long sentence. There are no periods—just commas—so the text never stops, giving it and the reader a feeling of perpetual movement, just like driving. Perhaps this is why the text of the novel features so many driving scenes; in other novels these moments might have been skipped, but here, form and content are merged so intimately that driving must be included. This allows the reader to experience the states that Asle comments on—the “stupor,” the “peaceful unthinking,” the “daze,” and the life that “becomes calm and peaceful.” What is happening in terms of plot is unimportant, but as preparatory moments—ritual moments, even—driving is key. Just as Asle begins to daydream as he’s driving (notice how the third example ends with “and I see Asle standing there in the Youth Centre,” which is the beginning of a reflection on his time as a guitar player in a band), the reader is also induced into a sort of dream—the novel itself—and is prepared for and initiated into the reading experience. What I mean to suggest is that Fosse’s novel is as much about the experience of reading it, the state of consciousness it induces in the reader, as it is about the actual meaning of the words on the page. This is similar to how Susan Sontag described the films of Robert Bresson:

The form of Bresson’s films is designed…to discipline the emotions at the same time that it arouses them: to induce a certain tranquility in the spectator, a state of spiritual balance that is itself the subject of the film.

The “tranquility” Sontag mentions, or the “spiritual balance,” is similar to Fosse’s “stupor,” “daze,” or “peaceful[ness];” in both cases, this phenomenological effect is achieved through a unity of form and content, which then allows for the viewer or reader to experience a unity of body and mind—the aforementioned “tranquility” or “daze,” etc.

Another word for this state is grace—not necessarily religious grace, although it could be that too, but grace as gracefulness, meaning a reconciliation of body and mind, where one’s movements flow effortlessly, or one’s prose seems smooth and unhurried, as if it writes itself. It is something along these lines, perhaps, that Merve Emre had in mind when she called Septology “the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine.” What Emre means, I think, is that the novel made her believe not through some sort of logical argument, but through the experience of the text itself. Fosse himself says (in conversation with Emre) that there is a “kind or reconciliation in my writing. Or, to use the Catholic or Christian word, peace.”

In this way, Fosse achieves something akin to “spiritual style” (how Sontag referred to Bresson’s films) or “transcendental style” (Paul Schrader’s term for the films of Bresson, Ozu, and Dreyer). I wrote about this idea in cinema repeatedly a couple of years ago, and at the time, I wondered: how could one transfer this style from cinema to literature? What would it look like, what would its formal features be? Fosse’s technique is one possibility, and somewhat without realizing it, I’ve been attempting in my fictional writing to create my own spiritual style. I discovered another short passage that I must have written after rereading the sections on biking, ice skating, and driving:

I didn’t know it—I didn’t know myself—but it appears I’m in search of these moments. How could I not know that? How is it that I had to write to discover this? And suppose I hadn’t written? My god.

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